Ashish Bhattacharjee sings Rabindranath Tagore’s songs with a precision and purism that go back to his teacher, Shailajaranjan Majumdar, and to that formidable ‘keeper’ of Tagore’s musical authenticity, Indiradebi Choudhurani. Bhattacharjee’s solo recital on December 2 at Rabindra Sadan, organized by Dakhshin Kalikata Nandaniki, gave his audience a substantial opportunity to reflect on both the pleasures and the rigours of such a style of singing. The songs in the first half were all from the Puja section of the Geetabitan. They were mostly Brahmasangeet, ranging from early songs composed when Tagore was in his twenties (Nutan praan dao and Nishidin chaho re) to those from his middle years, like Jani jani tomar preme shakol premer bani meshe and Bujhechhi ki bujhi nai ba.

Bhattacharjee’s perfectionist renderings — with minimal accompaniment and without any obvious enactment of emotions — made it possible to listen to, and think about, the feelings elaborated in each song, its particular form of inwardness. The humility and the audaciousness of these songs come from their emphasis on seeking rather than finding that turns gopon sheba into mukti, and brings together every kind of love in the experience of spiritual intensity. All this can be pondered, feelingly as well as dispassionately, within the public privacies afforded by such quiet, low-lit recitals.

Yet, it was this fastidious perfectionism, so uniformly dispassionate, that made the second half of the recital feel monotonous and too long. Bhattacharjee sang almost twenty of the Prakriti songs after the interval. They ranged across the seasons, starting with the mild, playful nostalgia of Boishakher ei bhorer haowa and finishing with the silent mingling of tears and laughter in Tumi kichhu die jao. There is a diversity of moods and feelings in these songs, the best of which suggest peculiar, yet never-fully-revealed, situations around their emotional core. Each song is thus the kernel for an unwritten short story, sometimes even a novel. This demands from the singer an ability to modulate his singing (and his being) in order to create a different persona for each song — subtly, without any overt histrionics.

It is here that Bhattacharjee’s austere adherence to the letter of the songs got to being so at the expense of their spirit. Often sounding tired in the upper registers and reading closely from the sheet in front of him, he never quite managed to liberate his final sequence of songs from a sort of academic punctiliousness. This turned even the vigorously evocative Oi je jhorer megher kole into a rather wan exercise in tunefulness. It would be sad if the excesses of the post-copyright era in Rabindrasangeet resulted in singers turning into anxious archivists instead of remaining inspired performers.